Upcoming
For the 2026 Converge 45 Triennial, New York-based artist Trisha Baga presents MORE, a monumental immersive installation at PICA that weaves together the rise of consumer AI and the artist’s own journey into parenthood. Guest Curated by Lumi Tan.
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Past
PICA presents "an imagined place (here and now)," a multichannel audio and visual installation by the Brooklyn-based artist Satpreet Kahlon. A 2022 Creative Exchange Lab artist, Kahlon’s exhibition will transform PICA’s 10,000-square-foot main space into an immersive exploration of fugitivity, deep space time, geologic memory, and possibility.
Learn morePortland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) is thrilled to announce Body on Me, a group exhibition by Cameron Clayborn, .Compost Cooperative (Tabitha Nikolai, Myra Lilith Day, garima thakur, Zanna Kerrigan, and Carly Barton), and Vishal Jugdeo, curated by Kristan Kennedy, PICA Artistic Director and Curator of Visual Art. Taking the human body and its many negotiations as its conceptual starting point, the presentation features media-based works that cross photography, installation, video, and video game technology and design. Throughout the exhibition, artists investigate digitally-mediated imagery of the natural world and human form in conversation with technological interventions. Body on Me will open with a performance by Clayborn on October 18, and will remain on view through December 20, 2025.
Learn moreOver the last several decades, textile artist Freddie Robins has earned a reputation as a radical conceptualist whose hand- and machine- made tapestries, sculptures, and chimerical assemblages are as playfully cheeky as they are political. In Apotropaic, many of Robins’ recent assemblages are composed of the soft and, at times, unwieldy remains of other projects, coupled with found stones and other natural objects, as well as treasures from her vast collection of things past.
Learn moreTender Revolutions/Yellow Songs is a hybrid project comprised of writings, music, and visual ephemera that tend to “yellow subjectivities” and enact small spaces of connectivity across boundaries of diaspora and identity. The work features poetry and music by Dao Strom, with She Who Has No Master(s) and Fear No Music.
Learn moreRooted in dovetailing practices of artmaking and gastronomy, Ray Anthony Barrett's "Who by Fire" returns to fire as one of the most fundamental elements for human survival.
Learn moreThis immersive installation explores the relationship between a group of Mayan youth living in Portland with with their mother tongue: maayat’aan (Maya Peninsular/Yucatec Mayan), an Indigenous language of present-day Yucatán, Mexico. Mostly shot in the Yucatán municipalities of Maní and Dzan with audio recorded in Portland, ja’ / buuts’ / t’aan investigates personal struggles to learn and preserve Indigenous languages that mirror enduring societal failures to support their survival.
Learn moreThis exhibition is an extension of Autumn Knight’s three-part performance series "NOTHING#15: a bar, a bed, a bluff," which investigates the Italian concept of “dolce far niente,” or “the sweetness of doing nothing.”
Learn moreThe first installment of Autumn Knight’s performance series NOTHING#15: a bar, a bed, a bluff, NOTHING#15: a bar enacts a social experiment that transforms PICA’s warehouse space into a host club, where a multitude of performers take on the task of provoking desire and exchanging acts of care with audience members.
Learn moreILY2 is thrilled to announce Noise / Grain, an exhibition of new works converging image, sound, and video by the Toronto-based artist Timothy Yanick Hunter. Noise / Grain will open on September 14 with a performance in the PICA Annex, co-presented by ILY2 as part of the 2024 Time-Based Art Festival. The exhibition will remain on view at ILY2 through November 9.
Learn moreSculptor Jess Perlitz has visions of boulders—big ones, large enough to hide behind or stack inside a museum diorama. With wry, anthropological wit, Perlitz offers her sculptures for examination in the context of two large vitrines in an academic reading room.
Learn moreTender is the nature of this immersive, dual-sited exhibition that invites us inward to experience the slow transformation of thought into moments of uncertainty, doubt, and recovery. Tenderness embodies the honesty we can bring to life, like the flow state that pulses throughout this magical collaboration.
Learn moreThe 2024 Time-Based Art Festival opens by honoring the Portland tradition of First Thursday with a come one, come all jam session with Videotones, Elbow Room’s neurodiverse digital media collective. No musical ability required—bring yourself, an instrument,* your voice. Come make a sound or just witness our giant, undulating community band.
Learn moreJoin us for an in-person group listening session of the new audio documentary about Black Cross Healthcare Collective (BCHC).
Learn moreThis exhibition examines policing practices in Portland, Oregon, and their relationship to longer local and national histories of oppression through the lens of artists who call Portland their home and those who played witness and documentarian from across the globe.
Learn moreUnderstanding extraterrestrials as a product of American mythology requires seeing the multiplicity of fears in the American consciousness. Just like the hydra of conspiracy that shapes America as a nation, the intersections between extraterrestrials and the American nation-state fracture into even more intricate pieces of an unsolvable puzzle. Multimedia artist and scholar Kite performs an experimental lecture, “What‘s on the Earth is in the Stars, and What’s in the Stars is on the Earth,” which probes the real conspiracies through multiple dimensions: Lakota epistemologies and the American paranormal.
Learn moreDeriving from the antique alchemistic concept of the four humors, melancholia has been a subject in science, culture, and art for centuries. Originally seen as the result of an imbalance of one of the four humors connected to a specific temperament called “black bile,” melancholia was connected to a deep sense of sadness that was believed to lead to depression, insanity, and later genius in the arts. Based in an auto-biographical collage this lecture will talk about death, birth, and past-potential-futures, proposing Black Melancholia as a place of solace and care for Black Life.
Learn moreRenowned artist, filmmaker, and writer Zach Blas will present a brand new performance lecture as part of the NIGHT SCHOOL program for this year's TBA Festival. Blas’ engagement in Portland is in partnership with the MA in Critical Studies program at Pacific Northwest College of Art at Willamette University.
Learn more“Drag Animism” explores Pepper’s personal and artistic explorations into cyborg consciousness and dirt-witch-glamour. It’s a visual and performative meditation on digital and physical bodies, the enchantment of nature, and the slippery potential of activating “persona power.”
Learn morejaamil olawale kosoko’s meditative multi-channel film and installation Syllabus for Black Love serves as the ship inside which the multimedia performance the hold is positioned. Through rhythmic and restorative gestures, the hold creates a perceptive and somatic experience for both performer and audience.
Learn moreSasha Worzel’s Dreams of Unknown Islands transforms the architecture of the museum into an ecological dreamscape in which coastal shores, animal migrations, and the shifting colors of the sky are transmitted through ritual sound, projected film, and a set of functional sculptures housing five listening islands that urge us to pause, rest, and contemplate.
Learn morePortland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) proudly presents Enchiridion: aisle, spline, resort, sidony o’neal’s first major solo exhibition in North America. Curated by Kristan Kennedy, Artistic Director and Curator of Visual Art, PICA. Supported by Oregon Community Foundation’s Creative Heights Initiative, The Ford Family Foundation, Stephanie and Jonathan Snyder, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Learn moreThis offering is a sci-fi-inspired multi-sensory stim, a personal reflection on the ways our sensitive systems intertwine with surroundings—how they collapse time, reorganize, spin out, and regulate. Apogee is climax at a distance.
Learn moreHow do we relate to images of the self when the self is in a state of breakdown? This question is one of the concerns at the heart of the Cooley Gallery exhibition No Face, No Case: Portraiture’s Breaking.
Learn moreInside layers of oppressive weather, words fall over a city, making control concrete. An adolescent shield absorbs, distorts, purges in the night, becomes a reservoir for a death dance. Made by Hong Kong raised sister/brother artists Jennie MaryTai Liu and Simon Liu with sound by Portland raised artist Andrew Gilbert, Conviction is a video installation containing two films, force and Sistern, shot in Hong Kong in 2019 and 2021 respectively.
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